All posts tagged "Harris County"

It was the moans of agony that first caught Ben Wolff’s attention.

As Wolff, a defense lawyer and the director of the Texas Office of Forensic and Capital Writs, followed a jailer down a Huntsville prison corridor, he knew that his new client, Syed Rabbani, was in poor physical condition. Rabbani, then 57, was serving a death sentence for a 1987 murder, and was reported to be in bad health.

But Wolff wasn’t prepared for the groans that wafted from Rabbani’s cell as the jailer jangled his keys. He wasn’t prepared for what greeted him as the jailer flipped the light switch, illuminating the concrete cell in a fluorescent glow. ...

Texas state Rep. James Talarico said that the Republican bill to ban books in the state has been blocked by a conservative judge.

The judge, Alan Albright, was appointed to the federal bench by then-President Donald Trump in 2018.

Albright called the bill an “unconstitutional law” that “could lead to banning classic works of literature.” ...

Republicans in the Texas legislature recently passed two bills that will affect how elections will be run in the state’s largest county, Harris County — a Houston-centered Democratic stronghold.

The first bill gets rid of Harris County’s elections administrator entirely, and the second allows the state’s Republican secretary of state to directly oversee elections in the county. These moves have been referred to as a Republican “power grab” by Democrats in the state.

Republicans argue that they’re making these changes because of election problems in the county, but Democrats argue that they’re targeting Harris County simply because it’s large and blue. President Biden won the county by 13 points in 2020. It may be that Republicans are worried that Texas overall will turn blue, or at least a shade of purple, because of — among other things — changing demographics in the state....